The Archives

Volume XLVI No. 1 - March 2019

Statues, Boulders & Monoliths: World War I Memorials of Connecticut 

Have you noticed the stone memorial on Willington’s Town Green? Would you like to know more about how that monument came to be? As the First World War ended, American communities hurried to memorialize the great efforts of their sons and daughters. Changes in cultural and civic ideals since the American Civil War led to extensive public discourse about what memorials should and should not be. Government leaders, artists, historians, and the monument industry itself promoted ideas from simple tablets to monoliths rivaling those of Egypt and Rome. Memorials throughout Connecticut exemplify this entire range of monumental styles. 

Having visited and cataloged more than 200 monuments throughout the 169 towns in Connecticut, Richard Franklin Donohue will display images of the monuments and share stories of their design, placement, and those persons whom they memorialized. Special attention will be given to those people and memorials of Willington and the surrounding area. 

This program will last approximately 1 hour, including a slide show of the memorials accompanied by musical recordings of the period. 

Mr. Donohue is the Town Historian of his hometown of Cromwell, CT. His original research has formed the basis of museum exhibits, lectures, and living history programs on topics ranging from 18th-century slavery to Civil War era subscription balls to early 20th-century marine engines. As President and Program Director of the Cromwell Historical Society for nearly fifteen years and a teacher in both public and private schools for twenty-five, he strives to enhance interest and participation in local and national history. In addition to his work with history, Richard is a tenor soloist specializing in Middle English Carols, Bach arias, and German Lieder and is the director of the 1876 Singing Society at Mystic Seaport.

A Moment on the Green

As recounted, January 2018, by Edwin Sundt who as a child grew up living on Willington Hill in the Baptist Parsonage. (Ed's father had been the minister of the Federated Church.) 

There were no other children then who lived on or even near Willington Hill, so I created many one-person games. But in the summer, a boy my age from Flushing, New York, Tony Vydra, would come to stay with his grandparents, the Dvorskys. Tony and I played two-man baseball games every day all summer, every summer. We are both in our 80's now and Tony is still my best friend, a retired Army colonel. 

A key unrecorded moment in the history of that area: from a spot on the northern side of the Common just where the line separates the parsonage from the Weston House, we had home plate. My friend Tony hit a pitched baseball over the width of the Common, over Route 44 (now Rt.74), over the lawn of the Federated Church, and onto the church roof. I was playing outfield at the time (Tony's cousin John was pitching) and professionally retreated until I was at the granite step in front of the (left) front door. The ball sailed way over my head, went past the church steeple, landed on the church's roof, and rolled off into the parking area. It was the longest ball I had ever seen hit. It was miraculous, marvelous, a true wonder. I raced back across the Common to our house to tell my mother what a wondrous feat I had just witnessed. Instead of being equally amazed and excited, she was angry. “You could have broken the stained glass window” she scolded. I thought to my-self, “No, it wasn't even close.” She didn't grasp the importance of the moment, though, and I went back outside and we resumed play. No batted ball ever came even close to the church again: it was too far.